Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/109

 choice of words the scheme of his greatest tragic design, his fullest and most various in vital incident and high truth of heroic life. The grand sonnet "on refusal of aid between nations" shows yet a fresh side and a most noble aspect of his great and manifold genius; its severe emotion and grave loveliness of ardent anger set a mark on it as of Dante's justice and judgment. "Autumn Idleness" is a splendid study of landscape, for breadth of colour and solemn brightness of vision worthy to stand by those great symbolic landscapes seen in the "House of Life," such as "Barren Spring" and "The Hill Summit;" and in "Beauty and the Bird" we have a sample of the painter's gladdest colour and sweetest tone of light. His full command of that lyric sentiment and power which give to mediæval poetry its clear particular charm is plain alike from the ending given to the "old song" of Ophelia and from the marvellous versions of Villon's and other French songs. The three sweetest of that great poet's who was the third singer of the Middle Ages and first vocal tongue of the dumb painful people in its agony and mirth and shame and strength of heart, are here recast in English gold of equal weight. The very cadence of Villon's matchless ballad of the ladies of old time is caught and returned. The same exquisite exactitude of translation is notable in "John of Tours"—the old provincial song long passed from mouth to mouth and at last preserved with all its breaks and lapses of sweet rough metre by Gérard de Nerval. His version of Dante's divinest episode, that of Francesca, I take to be the supreme triumph of translation possible; for what, after so many failures,—Byron's the dismallest failure of